I later found a NYT piece from 2002 which contained an actual rumour about the “iPhone”, including the name:

industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an ”iPhone.”

This, I think, would qualify as a rumour in most people’s definitions, though it didn’t include “leaked prototypes”.

But back to this Davidson piece, which might have been more insightful than the NYT’s one or even Beattie’s…

In hindsight, Davidson’s piece was both prescient of what would actually happen and telling in what didn’t happen. He talked about satellite radio, Plays for Sure, and WiMAX none of which panned out as planned. Also, Davidson surmised some things about Apple’s “content play” which were both less ambitious and more impactful (on Apple’s bottomline) than what actually happened. Apple’s 2007 move against DRM might have been surprising to the 2005 Davidson. And it’s funny to think back to an era when high prices for flash storage made it prohibitive to build a mobile device… 😉

Basically, though, Davidson was speculating about an integrated device which would replace several devices at once:

[We could argue about Android’s NFC play being closer to the digital wallet ideal than Apple’s passbook. The other parts are closer to a Treo anyway…]

In the abstract at least (and in Steve Jobs’s way of describing it), the iPhone has been this integrated communicating device about which people had been talking for years. So, kudos to Mike Davidson for predicting this a while in advance. He was neither the first nor the last, but he painted an interesting portrait.

Now, there are other parts to this story, I think. Given the fact that work on what would become iOS devices (iPad first, we’re told) hadn’t begun when Charles Wolf told the New York Times about a device called “iPhone” internally at Apple, I get the impression that the rumours predated much of the actual development work leading to the device. Speculation happened later still. It seems to relate to a number of things demonstrated by STS generally and SCOT specifically. Namely that technological development is embedded in a broader social process.

I also find interesting some side notions in all of these pieces. For instance, ideas about the impact the device might have on people’s usage. Or the fact that the move from the Treo to the iPhone ends up being quite significant, in retrospect. Even Davidson’s points about headphones and retail stores seem to relate to current things. So does the existence of the iPod touch and Apple TV in Apple’s lineup, addressing Mayfield and Cringely, respectively.

I also end up reflecting upon the shift from the “digital hub” strategy (peaking around 2007 or so) to the one revealed with iCloud, “Back to the Mac” and, yes, even Apple Maps. Dediu devotes much time to his mentor Clay Christensen’s notion of “disruptive innovation” and spent part of this latest Critcal Path episode talking about the risks behind Apple not being disruptive enough.

I normally don’t enjoy Quora. But I was just asked an anonymous question there which made me react. It’s close to the kind of question I get in my intro-level courses in sociology or anthropology, so I like to “do my job” of elucidating these issues.

Here’s the question:

Can there be such a thing as too much diversity?
Up until recently the rule for all immigrants was “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” This appears to have been replaced by “We’re not going to integrate but live as we did back home.”

Is it possible that at some point diversity becomes a detriment that divides society? Just look at how segregated some cities have become

Here’s my answer:

Funnily enough, I’m preparing an exam on material where this very issue appears. Unfortunately, this material isn’t online.
One of sociology’s core perspectives, functionalism, had “extreme diversity” among the conditions under which social order breaks down. The idea, there, was that it went against society’s integration, since the model was based on well-delimited groups.
That theory has been challenged multiple times. For one thing, very few groups have been that well-integrated. The modern notion of “what The Romans were” comes from a biased view and a limited understanding of what went on at the time. In fact, an episode of the Entitled Opinions podcast contains useful discussions of the very issue.

Same thing can be said about a number of other societies, including contemporary ones.
And this is where things get interesting. We’re probably living a transition from a period marked by the Nation-State (19th and 20th Centuries) to a period marked by fluid groupings, including social networks.
In the Nation-State (contemporary Somalia and Japan, along with the fiction of 19th Century France and possibly a short period of time in Ancient Rome), ethnic homogeneity is presumed and ethnicity is managed through a very complex bureaucratic system related to citizenship. The way ethnic groups are treated then is based on what Benedict Anderson called “Imagined Communities”.
In more fluid systems, which include most of human history, diversity is taken for granted and social integration comes from other dimensions of social life.
In the current context, we have an unusual mixture of rigid Nation-State identities in parallel with the reality of transnationalism, postnationalism, Globalization, and blurred boundaries.
So, to answer the question: is it so clear what the limits of the group are? If so, what are those limits based on? If not, why would diversity be a problem?

For those interested in fluid boundaries, a classic work is Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries”.